Where I lay out my radical ideas about engineering organizations, leadership, AI and the future of software.
The Productivity Paradox: Why AI Makes Your SDLC Worse Before It Makes It Better
I spent five years of my life watching paint dry. Not literally. But close. I was a manufacturing engineer before I was a software engineer, and I spent a lot of time on factory floors learning how things get built. One of the most important concepts I learned was Value Stream Mapping (VSM). I’d forgotten how much that training would matter. Until AI showed up and broke everything. Here’s the problem no one talks about: AI makes your team faster at writing code. But the rest of your SDLC hasn’t changed. When code that used to take days now takes hours, the queues just get bigger. You’re not delivering faster. You’re generating more work-in-progress that piles up waiting for human decisions. ...
The Real AI Skills Gap Isn't What You Think
I posted something like this on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, but wanted to revisit it in a longer form… For every engineer on my team doing advanced work with AI (building MCP servers, creating custom agents like Ralph and GasTown, automating complex workflows) there are ten who are overwhelmed by the noise. They’re not sure what tools they should be using. They don’t know why Sonnet 4.6 is better (or worse) than Gemini 3.5 Pro. They’re still using Copilot as a glorified autocomplete in their IDE. ...